Welcome to Troutreach Technologies. Troutreach Technologies has been building websites and supporting them for small organizations involved in a wide range of activities since 2007.  Our activities in this area actually started several years before the creation of Troutreach Technologies LLC.

Troutreach gets its name by combining the idea of reaching out using technology, principally the Internet, with my last name, Trout. We seek to serve four principal types of clients, the first two of which are involved in sharing the Gospel of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ:

1. Small churches and parachurch organizations that are too small to have their own personnel with the skills to establish a credible presence on the World Wide Web;
2. Individual missionaries that have a desire to communicate with their supporters via the Internet;
3. Nonprofit organizations;
4. Small businesses that need help establishing and maintaining an Internet presence.

We've observed that many potential clients have attempted to build a web presence through using mass marketed, "easy to build," template based, static web building tools. While they offer a low cost presence they all too frequently become stale, limiting, and difficult to update. We used this model ourselves a few years ago for our first website and saw firsthand the limitations of this model.

Conventional website design, like that noted above, relies upon static pages that are usually generated on a personal computer and then uploaded to a simple server. Similar alternatives use on-line page building tools to generate the static pages. The result is a website that is tied to a single PC and frequently limited to being updated by a single person.

In looking for a better solution we discovered another, more flexible, model, the Content Management System, or CMS. Content Management Systems generally combine three functions on a web server to create pages when requested by site visitors. Those three functions are:

1. Most importantly, the site's content, the information that the site seeks to serve to the visitor. Most of this information is stored in a database to be accessed, or updated, when needed. Other content, e.g., pictures or images, is stored in conventional files on the server. The names and locations of these files is maintained in the database.
2. Programs to combine the content with appropriate control structures (HTML, HyperText Markup Language) to be presented to the visitor's browser. HTML could easily be described as the language of the Internet.
3. Formatting information, supplied via Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, that describe how the HTML is presented to the user. E.g., it's the CSS files from a theme called "Tapestry" that gives this page its dark text (it's not black) on a light background.

There are literally hundreds of Content Management Systems in use on the Internet today, both proprietary and Open Source. Our research led us to try a couple and we finally selected Drupal as our CMS of choice. Drupal is one of, if not the, most heavily used CMSs in the world. It runs small sites like ours and our clients' and large sites like WhiteHouse.gov.

Why Drupal? You may ask. Because:

• Drupal is extremely powerful in both its core functions and the literally thousands of additional modules that have been developed to expand upon core capabilities.
• Drupal's learning curve, while steep, is easier than that of competing systems.
• Once a Drupal site is established it can be updated and maintained easily by non-technical users.
• It's maintainable and updateable from any computer connected to the Internet.

Right now this site is still in its infancy, or, put another way, proof that the cobbler's kids go barefoot. We've been busy lately working on other people's websites and haven't had time to further develop this site.  You can see some examples on the Portfolio page .

Thanks for stopping by. Please come back soon to check for updates. Feel free to use our Contact page to send us your comments, questions and inquiries.

Thanks for visiting.  We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Curtiss (Curt) Trout
Managing Partner
Troutreach Technologies LLC